Three Realist Lessons From Obama’s Syria Missteps

Whether the deal to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles is enforceable and verifiable is an open question. But what is clear is that some cautionary lessons have already emerged from this crisis. Here are three of them.

First, be wary of the injunction “Don’t just stand there; do something.”

Since Syria erupted into civil war in mid-2011, commentators left and right have called for the United States to attack the Assad regime as well as to provide arms to its opponents.

But contrary to what many liberal hawks and neoconservatives claim, the violence in Syria is no worse than what Washington has been able to bear with comparative equanimity in Rwanda, Sudan, and Congo. On what moral grounds should one decide that one war is intolerable while another can be ignored?

In the field of foreign policy, the most famous advice offered to practitioners—the French statesman Talleyrand’s “Above all, not too much zeal”—showed a profound distaste for “busyness.” It’s both wise and routinely ignored advice. Remember how can-do, hands-on liberal hawks (Rusk, McNamara) screwed things up in Vietnam or how hyperactive neoconservatives (Wolfowitz, Feith) proved to be incompetent and ineffective in Iraq.

None of this is to imply that forceful action is never justified: it is in the right circumstances and when the right conditions are met. But the national interest did not require a major U.S. intervention in Syria, the political support for it did not exist and could not be mobilized, and the conflict itself has been morally ambiguous: a brutal dictatorship, backed by Shiite Iran and its Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah, versus a largely Islamist rebellion supported by Sunni powers as well as al-Qaeda-aligned extremist fighters.

Given that the political objective was perilously unclear, there has been much to be said for a policy of restraint and caution. As even President Obama warned as recently as last month: “Sometimes what we’ve seen is that folks will call for immediate action, jumping into stuff that does not turn out well, gets us mired in very difficult situations, can result in us being drawn into very expensive, difficult, costly interventions that actually breed more resentment in the region.”

A second lesson: Don’t make threats or commitments lightly; make them only if you’re prepared and able to honor them.

Two years ago, the president called for regime change in Damascus. In August last year, he warned that the use or even mere movement of chemical weapons was a “red line” that “would change my calculus.” And last month he called on the U.S. Congress to give him authorization to use force against the Syrian dictatorship in response to the chemical weapons attack.

Far from following through on his threat of limited U.S. military strikes, however, Obama leapt at Russia’s diplomatic offer for the Assad regime to dismantle its chemical stockpiles.

In so doing, he failed to set and keep priorities and to steer a steady course. The result is that American credibility and prestige have been dissipated and squandered, with potential U.S. adversaries emboldened and allies dejected.

The episode is a salutary reminder that he who wills the ends must also will the means, that aspirations should match resources, and that commitments and power should be brought into balance in foreign-policy deliberations.

Call it the Walter Lippmann rule, and it is a truth of which Americans—more apt to focus on ends than means when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world—always need to be reminded.

A third lesson: get over the superpower syndrome. With the collapse of Soviet Communism and the end of the Cold War, the accepted wisdom held that Washington should adopt a policy of indiscriminate global intervention. “American global leadership,” an “American Century,” “indispensable notion,” “benign hegemony”—these became the new buzzwords of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

The rhetoric became bellicose after 9/11, when American outrage over the terrorist attacks, taken together with the mental habits of global hegemony and American exceptionalism, gave U.S. leaders a clear, overriding sense of mission and purpose.

Consider the last two secretaries of state, who epitomized a belief in the virtues of uninhibited American interventionism. In 2008, Condoleezza Rice declared: “It is absolutely clear that we will be involved in nation building for years to come.” And in 2010, Hillary Clinton said “it is in our DNA” to believe “there are no limits on what is possible or what can be achieved.”

But although the United States possesses the military means to defeat any other country, there is not an American solution to every problem. In fact, there are a good many problems, such as Syria’s civil war, for which there may be no solution at all.

As realists from George Kennan to Henry Kissinger have argued, Americans do not have the understanding of other societies and people, the attention span or staying power, to engage in an active, interventionist policy of nation-building and democracy-promotion on a large scale.

This is especially evident at a time when a majority of Americans believes it is high time for the nation to concentrate on its own neglected internal problems. The defense budget has fallen and will continue to fall, and there is a strong aversion to seeing U.S. soldiers killed and wounded.

To the extent that such views prevail, they are inimical to the notion that that America has a special mission to impose its will and leadership across the globe.

Tom Switzer is editor of the Spectator Australia and a research associate at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre.

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8 Responses to Three Realist Lessons From Obama’s Syria Missteps

You answered one of your questions yourself, in the sentence immediately following it.

Q: “On what moral grounds should one decide that one war is intolerable while another can be ignored?”

A: “`Above all, not too much zeal.’”

In other words, prudence is always necessary in deciding which just wars to fight and which just wars not to fight. It may be right sometimes to fight wars not in one’s national interest. But it would be not only imprudent, but also immoral, to base the decision to do so on a moral norm alone.

b) Hillary’s real quote, without ellipses: “Throughout our history, through hot wars and cold, through economic struggles, and the long march to a more perfect union, Americans have always risen to the challenges we have faced. That is who we are. It is in our DNA. We do believe there are no limits on what is possible or what can be achieved

There is nothing wrong with this statement by Hillary. However, we need to make sure is that we face the right challenges. And Syria is perhaps a challenge that America had no need to take on (although there is justification in establishing a principle that chemical warfare will not be tolerated).

I completely agree that Obama should have not called for regime change in Syria, or so publicly drawn a line in the sand regarding Chem Weapons use that neocon hawks could use to goad him into intervention.

That said, I’m convinced that the sentiment that the neocon hawks pushed … and you echo … American credibility and prestige have been dissipated and squandered, with potential U.S. adversaries emboldened and allies dejected is just way overdone, if not flat out wrong.

If our credibility and prestige are dissipated in the world today, you should probably start with the loss of credibility when Colin Powell went to the United Nations to make his iron clad case for Saddam’s possession of WMD stockpiles … and the loss of prestige when America so mismanaged the Afghanistan and Iraq occupations that we got bogged down for a decade with financially ruinous costs and scant little results to show.

Meanwhile, fast forwarding, America’s government today must look to outsiders like a complete mockery of good governance, with an opposition party which has demonstrated that they will not compromise on any measure, no matter what that does to the legislative process. With wave after wave of threats to shut down the government, or default on our debts, we are making a joke out of ourselves.

For what it’s worth, my guess is that while Obama’s threats to bomb Syria did American prestige and credibility no good whatsoever – his leap at Russia’s diplomatic offer has probably done significant good. My guess is that only Israel is truly disappointed that we’re not launching missiles at Syria already, and everyone else in the world is breathing a big sigh of relief that the US is showing a bit of maturity in our foreign policy that was utterly lacking during the Bush Administration. Credibility and prestige can be cultivated more through prudent inaction than by rash action, going back to your first point, and Obama should get credit for taking that course, even if it was late in the game.

A much simpler “realist” lesson could be learned, not just from Syria, but from the course of US foreign policy generally. And that is don’t engage in acts of war unless there is a clear case to be made for US self defense or an equally clear case that the US is enforcing a UNSC resolution. The first scenario speaks for itself.

The second scenario, while couched seemingly exclusively in terms of international legality, actually contains within it serious prudential criteria. No SC resolution means, in practice, that such a resolution was sought but was not forthcoming. And that means, in turn, that the proposed was so unpopular internationally that no resolution could pass at all (as in the second Iraq war) or that the Russians and/or Chinese had threatened to veto it or did veto it (as in the recent Syria controversy). If the membership generally of the SC won’t go along with a proposed war, chances are that it has good reason for that view. The US is not the sole repository of wisdom. Moreover, whatever the moral question involved, if the SC as a whole does not favor the war, that means that the US is either going it alone, or has, at best, a small coalition behind it. Which means that the war is controversial internationally, and will not redound to the USA’s credit, even if successfully prosecuted.

If there would be a SC resolution but for the veto power of Russia (and much less often, China), still, that probably means that there is a fair amount of opposition to the war internationally, beyond Russia or China themselves. And, again, why should we think that the US has a better handle on what should be done than those other countries? We actually have no reason to think so, despite all of our self congratulations and self valorization. In other words, if a war is not popular internationally, there is a good chance it is not in the interests of the USA to fight it, and that is on top of the negative consequences of the US violating international law by going to war without a SC rez and without a claim of self defense.

Notice also that pushing SC’s resolutions too far, stretching their meaning, adopting absurd interpretations, refusing to budge on them, and using them to justify war when no one (or almost no one) else thinks the words in the resolution mean what the US says they means, also leads to wars that are bad for prudential reasons. Here I have in mine, for one, the second Iraq war. Because the US could not even get a majority on the SC for a new resolution clearly authorizing the resumption of war, it relied instead on its idiosyncratic interpretations of the resolutions dating back to the first Iraq war. And earned the scorn of most of the world, again, both for its law breaking but also for its contempt for international opinion. The US knew better than the “Surrender Monkey” French, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, etc, etc. Sure it did. Another example is the most recent affair with Libya. The US (and the UK and France) got their SC resolution, but it only seemed to authorize measures to provide for the protection of civilians. And yet the neo colonialist powers chose to stretch that language to and beyond the limit, and used it as cover for their blatant campaign of regime change. Again, the world, including the Chinese and the Russians, which had signed off on what was supposed to be the limited use of force, was disgusted. And, again, not only by the brazen law breaking, but by the contempt shown to the rest of the world. We promise the world community we are only going to use limited force to prevent what we claim are imminent atrocities, but then we go whole hog, and use our air and missile forces as a countrywide “rolling barrage,” behind which the forces of rebellion advance and, ultimately, depose the leader who we never liked in the first place. In the short run, yes, we got what we wanted, but in the long run we are not making friends and influencing people by our behavior.

Contrast these wars with those for which a UN resolution was sought, and gotten, and which actually authorized the war that was fought. The best example would be the first Iraq war. A broad resolution was passed, one that clearly authorized the use of force to get Iraq out of Kuwait. The entire world, including the Arabs AND the Israelis, the Iranians, and the Russians and the Chinese, was on board. The war, mostly fought by the USA and its allies, was completely successful. Kuwait’s independence was restored. And the US was seen in a favorable light by almost everyone.

And that did not change until the USA refused to end the affair, keeping the no fly zones and other sanctions in place endlessly, calling for regime change, bombing Iraq intermittently, and, eventually, starting another war.

Somewhat similarly, after 9/11, the US got its SC resolution, and went to war in Afghanistan, ostensibly to get the Al Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the terrorist attacks and to remove the Taliban government which sheltered them. And, more or less, the US achieved those two goals almost immediately. Again, most folks around the war thought all of this was pretty much fitting and proper, and the US won not only the military campaign but the wider diplomatic battle.

It was only, once again, as in Iraq, by overstaying, by doing more, or trying to do more, than the resolution contemplated, that the US has again created hostility and alienation against itself. Somehow, it was not enough that the Taliban had been driven from power. No, now it must be eradicated entirely, even though that is more or less impossible. It was not enough that the top leadership of Al Qaeda was destroyed, no, now we think we have to kill that top leadership over and over again (how many times has the US killed “the number three” man at AQ?), and eradicate the organization entirely, again, even though that too is more or less impossible. And now we have spread the war, to Pakistan and elsewhere, in a never ending quest to do more, far more, than was ever contemplated by the SC. And are, once again, paying the price for it in international affairs.

Thus, not just from the standpoint of international legality, but also from a “realist” perspective, the only wars the US should be fighting are those in its own self defense and those clearly authorized by the SC.

I think Obama currently is making a mistake, in pressuring Russia and China to agree to a UNSC resolution

Meanwhile, as it seems such a resolution to force Syria to dismantle their chemical weapons program has been worked out … can we now give up the notion that Obama has somehow harmed America’s prestige and influence?

Hillary has never apologized for her Iraq War vote. You imply that was a “right challenge” by failing to point this out.
She objected to the manner Bush fought the war.
Easy to do after the fact.
But Pat Buchanan and Scott Ritter among others, had already exposed the WMD intel as
chicanery before Clinton voted.
She expected an easy win either way and it cost her the Presidency.
You go on to question the “neocon hawks” but I have yet to have anyone explain to me any important difference between neolib hawks like Hillary who have not earned the right to be approvingly quoted on war, and neocon hawks.

I’m not one to be defending Hillary much on her Iraq War vote, which I think was a typical Clintonesque “Triangulation” move where she wanted to establish that she wasn’t some kind of peacenik and damage her future Presidential bids. And she was punished for that vote, perhaps more than any other politician in America was punished for their culpability in the Iraq War.

But look at her speech given on the Senate floor at the time:

So Mr. President, for all its appeal, a unilateral attack, while it cannot be ruled out, on the present facts is not a good option….
I will take the President at his word that he will try hard to pass a UN resolution and will seek to avoid war, if at all possible….
Because bipartisan support for this resolution makes success in the United Nations more likely, and therefore, war less likely, and because a good faith effort by the United States, even if it fails, will bring more allies and legitimacy to our cause, I have concluded, after careful and serious consideration, that a vote for the resolution best serves the security of our nation.

In short, Hillary screwed up. She didn’t favor cutting off inspections and beginning attacks on Iraq, as Bush did.

She put her trust in Bush’s word that he would do his best to avoid war – which was a horrible misjudgement on her part.

She voted for the AUMF in order to give Bush more credibility when he pressed Saddam on WMDs … and actually, it seems that was a successful strategy with respect to managing Saddam, who opened his borders and books and demonstrated as much as he could that he no longer had WMD stockpiles or programs.

Unfortunately it wasn’t a successful strategy with respect to managing Bush.

All that aside, I make no implication that war with Saddam was the right challenge – and if you read Hillary’s speech in full, you will see that at the time she did not contend that either.

Unfortunately, she (and others who voted alongside her) screwed up. Bush didn’t want leverage to force concessions from Saddam – Bush wanted to send American troops into Iraq. Period. When considering the AUMF, Congress was focused too much on how it would affect the behavior of the wrong sociopath.